When the news came down that a jury in New York had found Live Nation guilty of operating an illegal monopoly, I was flying to an annual conference at the University of Chicago that a decade ago kicked off the conversation about antitrust. (It’s kind of moved on since then; the theme of the conference this year was “Can Capitalism Be Popular?” This is the University of Chicago, after all.) It was a fitting place to ponder over what could very well become the first major company in the age of revived antitrust enforcement to be broken up.
A jury of men and women made this determination. When this case was brought in 2024, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, under the direction of Jonathan Kanter, explicitly sought a jury trial, on the assumption that while a judge tries to look smart, a jury looks at the evidence.
In this case, the evidence was incredibly clear: Live Nation uses its various business lines—venue ownership, ticketing, event promotion, and artist management—as mutually reinforcing, to build dominant positions and make it impossible for competitors to operate or for anyone to escape its clutches. In internal communications, Live Nation executives regaled one another about “robbing [customers] blind.” They openly threatened venues that didn’t want to use their services, retaliated against those who didn’t heed that warning, and used proxies like Oak View Group, a nominal competitor, to send the message. And they use creative accounting, including multiple sets of books, to hide the fruits of this market domination from the public.
You could look smart and talk about relevant product markets and relative quality of ticketing services, or you could look at the evidence. “There were a couple emails—the tone, the language they used,” the foreperson told journalist Gigi Liman, that “stuck in the head of everybody as evidence.”
But beyond the structure of the trial, the nature of the victory is incredibly important for the future of the economy. Despite working tirelessly to remove liability from Live Nation, the Trump administration was wholly unsuccessful. They settled the Biden-era federal case for a fine amounting to four days of Live Nation revenue and a minor sale of small amphitheaters, amid lobbying from MAGA confidants Kellyanne Conway and Mike Davis, along with Trump’s agent Ari Emanuel, who sits on the Live Nation board. They timed the settlement to catch their partners in the case, a coalition of 40 attorneys general, completely off guard, leaving them without any resources to continue to pursue it. They browbeat the Republican states to join the settlement and hence split the bipartisan consensus. They obviously hoped the case would fizzle, that the states wouldn’t be able to scramble together enough arguments to convince the jury. And when that happened and Live Nation went back to its exploitative business model, millions of dollars would change hands for a job well done.
This strategy was a failure. And it failed in ways that are likely to change what the economy looks like for the next three years.
The states were able to mount a case, rooted in the copious evidence that the jury would engage with. They hired super-lawyer Jeffrey Kessler, who is amassing an incredible track record in antitrust litigation. They shifted from a silent partner to running the show in just one week, and prosecuted one of the only successful monopolization cases in the last 25 years, with really only the exception of the federal case against Google. And that included Republican AGs; right after the verdict, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, locked in a runoff election for Senate against incumbent John Cornyn, proudly boasted of defeating Live Nation in court.
So, hilariously, did the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, lugubriously congratulating the AGs for “a win for everyone in our country besides Live Nation” and trying to position its light-touch settlement as consistent with that, something so absurd that it drew a community note on X.
For Live Nation, their fate now lies in the hands not of the jury, but of Judge Arun Subramanian. He will hold a remedy phase of the trial and decide how to proceed. The jury endorsed the calculation of the states’ expert witness, Dr. Rosa Abrantes-Metz, that Live Nation charged an illegal markup of $1.72 on each ticket sold over the past eight years. But Subramanian will be asked to do more; the plaintiffs demanded a breakup of the company when they brought the case, and Live Nation has discrete business lines in ticketing and event promotion and artist management and venue operations that make a breakup quite practical. We may see the difference between a jury and a judge in stark terms with this remedy, and whether Subramanian, who was incensed about the settlement but mostly because it altered his precise courtroom schedule, will be willing to follow the evidence to its logical conclusion.
But the impact of this will not just end with Live Nation. The pay-to-play system set up by the Trump administration made a merger or monopolization just a matter of giving a few million dollars to the right lobbyists. There has been a burst of concentration throughout economic sectors in the last year, as the C-suites realize the corrupt nature of the regulatory environment. Some truly absurd notions, like a merger between United and American Airlines, have been floated.
That gambit is probably over, or at least significantly hobbled. State AGs have already signaled that they’re likely to take more actions. They are working to block the Nexstar-Tegna merger and will probably try to block the merger between Paramount and Warner Bros., on the back of growing public support in Hollywood. Every company thinking about using their market power or joining up with a competitor will have to think about the fact that, even if they have the means to buy off the Trump administration, they might run afoul of the states. That’s a new piece of information that their consultants and advisers will have to tell them. And it will create a chilling effect on the continued narrowing of who benefits in the economy.
It was not preordained that states would step up like this and have the talent and drive to succeed. But it creates a new hurdle for market consolidation. No matter what happens going forward, that really matters.
Read more
Live Nation Verdict Serves as a Warning
Companies thought they could get away with anything while Donald Trump was in office. But today they have a new problem: state attorneys general, and juries full of ordinary Americans.
Aftermath: How the War Might Cancel Your Flight
In today’s newsletter: Higher aviation travel prices and even mass cancellations are imminent. Also, China is a big winner and loser from the war.
On Tax Day, Mamdani Taxed the Rich
The mayor, his supporters, and public opinion convinced their previously reluctant governor to agree to a tax on the second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc.) homes of their city’s nonresident rich.
